gouache – Page 32 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

WWM #5: (Foot) Loose & (Fancy) Free

“Well,” I thought to myself, “how to express ‘loose and free’?”

I thought about wild hair, lions and zebras on the veld, and all sorts of crazy things. Nothing felt right. Then the word “foot loose” came to mind, and, as they say, the rest is history.

“Foot loose” means traveling. What better way to travel than a luxurious sea voyage (and maybe a camel ride when you hit Cairo). Those wonderful vintage posters for ships to exotic and wondrous ports of call make you want to pack a steamer trunk and just go! Gouache lends itself perfectly to such classical posters, and I must say, painting this was a thrill – a puzzle – a delight. I hope you like it as much as I do!

WWM #3: Picnic Food

The third prompt for #WorldWatercolorMonth! Here, picnic food. Bread, wine, cheese, fruit. Sounds a lot more healthy than burgers and fries, and certainly more attractive to paint! But, oh, what a challenge gouache is compared with watercolor. I haven’t worked in opaque medium in years and years and years. Personally, I don’t like the picnic basket, but the cheese, bread, wine, and (sorta) the fruit look okay.

I started with broad swaths of the major colors, such as the green, browns, blues, and laid in the underlying colors for the bread, cheese and apples. From there I moved into less thin paint to thicker, working from the most distant (the grass) to the foreground. At the end, I laid a thin wash of ultramarine blue to dissolve a bit of the underlying gouache to create shadows, knowing full well it would lift and blur the paint underneath it.

While I cannot say I love the painting – still lives are not things I pursue, preferring landscapes – I can say that it was definitely a worthwhile study. Paint handling is getting a bit more intuitive and logical. So different than watercolor – but at the same time comprehensible, if that makes any sense. It’s really just understanding the logistics of the medium . . . And, I think I am improving (a bit) in using gouache, which is a good feeling. I’m looking forward to the challenge of alternating transparent with opaque medium during #WorldWatercolorMonth.

WWM #1: Primary Palette

The very first entry of #WorldWatercolorMonth! The prompt is “primary palette” and so I chose a painting that predominates with the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. From there, secondary colors were mixed, such as oranges and greens. With gouache, water may be used to thin the paints, but white and black are often used to lighten or darken colors as needed. Given the fact I haven’t done much painting over the past 2 or 3 weeks, this one worked out rather well. Let’s see what happens tomorrow!

World Watercolor Month: July 2019

Communities sometime just happen, and sometimes it takes the vision of an individual to make the community happen.

In this case, Charlie O’Shields has done both. He created Doodlewash, and from there, he has created World Watercolor Month.

This year I am going to try to do a painting every day in July for World Watercolor Month. In the past few weeks I’ve fallen off as I have veered into ink making and indigo dyeing. Now, time to return to a good daily habit. I think daily artwork is like brushing your teeth every day – it makes for a more pleasant start to the day!

I did Inktober for most of the month of October 2018, and it was a wonderful process, and in doing it I learned so much. Pen and ink is black and white and World Watercolor is with colors, in the form of gouache or watercolor – or probably any other water-based medium. I expect I will learn a lot by being focused on this as well. Because I am attempting to learn gouache and improve my poor watercolor skills, maybe I will alternate medium daily – like odds for gouache and evens for watercolor. What do you think?

Use the hashtag #WorldWatercolorMonth to draw people to your work if you participate.

Under the Oaks

This past spring in California has been one of the most stunning I can recall. A long period of rain, extending deep into May, produced a situation in which flowers bloomed, and bloomed, and bloomed. There are still traces of colors – golds and yellows mostly – on the hills when normally the color is beige and dead. The richness of the wildflowers made the landscape, whether on the hills or under the trees, in the meadows or alongside the freeway, a wonderland of color. I am still sorting out photos and memories as sources for paintings.

This is an underpainting for the gouache painting I did today. Wildflowers under the oak trees along a local trial – lupines, wild cucumber, white and yellow flowers of known and unknown species. Here, a la James Gurney, I decided to do an underpainting using casein paints. He suggests casein as the underpainting as it cannot be picked up, as can an underpainting of gouache, once it dries. It primes the paper, too. While the smell is rather gross, the substrate it creates is stable and I rather liked using it, not just for what it did for the paper, but to lay in some values as well.

From there, I moved into remembering – thin layers to thick in gouache, building to lighter colors and thicker layers as you move along. I’ve watched a number of videos on YouTube to get a sense of the process. In particular, I have enjoyed the videos on gouache by Sarah Burns. It’s rather strange to me, but it worked out. Below is a painting of blue-eyed grass and white flowers under the oak trees in this stunning California spring.